About

Jane Adeney has lived and worked in the Hamilton area for the past twenty-five years. She has exhibited widely, both locally and across Canada, and has gained considerable critical respect. Her sculptural and installation works are comprised of darkly smokefired clay boxes and chests, fitted with domestic and industrial findings that bring with them both formal and associative qualities. Within the constructed containers are revealed, or hidden, various elliptical and enigmatic objects allusive of human passions, fears, and longings. Bathed in warm light, the interiors are often accessed with difficulty or through implicit transgression. Austere, almost minimal, in their initial aspect, the works speak of powerful secrets forcibly constrained.

“My artistic practice reflects, in its forms, processes, and materials, my fascination with the rituals through which we strive to find meaning in our experience on this earth. As I laboriously build my dark obstinate containers from this most primal material of Biblical Creation, I feel as if I am giving physical form to my own struggle to create order from chaos. Over time I have come to realize that this is my underlying theme: the human mind’s desire to impose form upon obdurate material, to discover patterns, create paradigms, make sense of things: the stubborn and insistent compulsion to build boxes.” Jane Adeney, 2006